Thursday, May 19, 2016

How Tatars Took Power in Two Chuvash Villages – By Majority Vote

Paul
Goble

Staunton, May 19 – In Soviet times,
the Communist Party determined who would be in which position, a fact of life
that in many cases meant that a member of a titular nationality of a particular
region could always count on having the top job, although real power was
concentrated in the hands of his deputy who was typically an ethnic Russian.

Now, with at least some progress to
democracy at the local level, that has changed, and those groups with the
largest numbers and greatest interest are the ones who occupy the top positions
in cities and towns at least, a development that some fear could spark ethnic tensions
especially where the new majority is different from the official titular one.

This situation is not often
discussed in the Russian media, but Elena Zaytseva, a journalist in Chuvashia,
provides some useful insights on how and why this is happening in an article
called “Rural Nationality Policy: How the Tatars are taking Power in Chuvash
Villages” (nazaccent.ru/content/20715-derevenskaya-nacpolitika.html).

She examines the situation in two
villages of the Shemurshin district of the Chuvash Republic: Trekhbaltayeva
which has 1274 residents, and Bayderyakov which has 844.Both villages are multi-national with the
Tatars forming 65 percent of the total, the Chuvash 25 percent, and the Mordvins
and Russians about six percent.

In Soviet times, Zaytseva says, the
local leaders were “largely” ethnic Chuvash. “But in the last 15 to 20 years,
power has ‘passed’ into the hands of the Tatars,” who occupy all the top
government jobs there, a development that some outsiders have thought would
spark conflict but which has not.

To her “surprise,” the journalist
says, “it turns out that the villagers are not agitated by the nationality
question at all.” They explain to anyone who will listen that what has happened
reflects “objective causes,” including Chuvash disinterest in taking low-paying
government jobs and simple demographics.

These are most important, Zaytseva
suggests. On the one hand, “the Chuvash and Mordvin population in the villages
mainly consists of elderly people” who are on pensions and have no interest in
any jobs, let alone political ones.And
on the other, the Tatars are simply more numerous, the result of having larger
families.

In the local assemblies, all
nationalities are represented, Tatars and Chuvash about equally, but there are
ethnic Russians and Mordvins as well. In the schools, most teachers are
Chuvash, and they now teach the Chuvash and Tatars in the same classes,
something that helps overcome ethnic suspicious rather than promote it as
separate classes did earlier.

According to Zaytseva, the
population of these villages is overwhelmingly multi-lingual and shifts from
one language to another depending on the language of the other person, speaking
Tatar with Tatars, Chuvash with Chuvash, Russian with Russians and so on.Other languages are less widely used.

There may be people in these two
villages who are upset with nationality issues or the ethnic composition of the
people in the top jobs, Zaytseva says, but she hasn’t met any of them. Instead,
what she sees is a population whose various ethnic components have been living
together for a long time and who will do so in the new situation as well.